Shifting house is a very simple affair, as most of the building materials are carried about in the canoes, and the canoes come and go in the most casual and unaccountable manner. Sometimes there were perhaps a thousand people at Wakatimi, and then there would be days when there was not a soul in the village. There were times when for weeks together there were large villages at the mouth of the river, and there were other times when the coast was utterly deserted and hardly a trace of the villages remained. We were never able to learn what it was that prompted these migrations of the natives, but it is probable that the pursuit of food was the guiding motive. The wandering habits of the people will certainly make it very difficult to administer the country and civilise the people, if an attempt to do so is ever made.
THEIR HOUSES
The typical native house of the Mimika district is a simple rectangular structure with a framework of light poles driven into the ground, the cross-pieces and roof pole being tied to the uprights by strands of rattan. In some houses the roof is a simple slope downwards from front to back, but in most cases there is a central ridge pole from which the roof slopes to the back and front, that at the back being longer and going lower than that in front. The height of the ridge is about eight feet; after we had been for some time in the country the people improved their building in imitation of our houses and built their huts ten, and even twelve feet high. The roof is made of “atap,” the thatch described above (p. [60]), and the walls are mats made from the leaves of a Screw-pine (Pandanus). The area of an average hut is about 9 by 12 feet, the longer dimensions being from front to back.
PAPUAN HOUSES ON THE MIMIKA.
The floor is covered with sand to a depth of several inches, which is prevented from escaping into the street by a board placed on its edge along the front of the hut. The sand is brought from the seashore and must be of great value in preserving the health of the people: the huts are frequently under water in the big floods and without the sand, which quickly dries, it would be impossible for them to live there. Unfortunately the sand aggravates the sores and ulcers from which too many of them suffer, but that is perhaps a lesser evil than always sleeping on sodden ground. Racks made of sticks, on which are stowed bundles of arrows, spears, clubs, tobacco, sago and all the other portable property of the family, extend from one wall to another, so that it is almost impossible to stand upright inside a hut. The door is an opening about two feet square in the front wall; as well as being the means of entrance for the members of the household the door serves as the principal means of escape for the smoke of the fire, which is constantly kept burning inside.
It is only rarely that a house remains for long separated from others; when a second house is built it is attached to the side of the first, and the dividing wall is removed. In a large village the houses are built in rows of varying length, according to the nature of the ground, and there may be as many as fifty or sixty joined together. If you go inside you find that it is a single long house without any dividing walls, but each family keeps to its own particular section and use its own private entrance. When the place is crowded with people, and a number of fires are burning, the atmosphere inside the house may be more readily imagined than described.
The feature that most distinguishes Wakatimi from all the other villages that we saw is its fine grove of coconut palms. The village street is bordered with them on the side opposite to the houses, and there must be three or four hundred trees in all. They afford a very pleasant shade to the village, and their graceful trunks curving this way and that are really picturesque and conveniently relieve the ugliness of the Papuan houses. It is rather dangerous to live so close to coconut trees, and sometimes when the wind blew in gusts before the rain we heard warning shouts and the heavy thud of a nut falling to the ground; but accidents never seemed to happen. The nuts are, of course, a source of great wealth to the Wakatimi people, who exchange them for bananas and tobacco with the people of Obota, and while we were in the country they brought us altogether thousands of nuts for which they received riches undreamt of before. At one or two places near the sea, and at several places on the Mimika River we found coconut palms, but far up the river they did not occur, nor did we see any on the Kapare River; and I believe all those we saw were planted by the natives, and that none of them were self-sown.
The method of cultivation is extremely simple. A ripe nut is left out on the roof of a hut and allowed to sprout; when the shoot is about a foot or more in length, a small patch of ground is cleared, preferably in a sandy place on the river bank or near the sea shore, a hole is dug and the sprouting nut is planted. From time to time, if he remembers to do so, the native will clear away the strangling vegetation from the young plant, and in about five years, under favourable conditions, the palm begins to bear fruit.
DRUNKENNESS